Short Film: Update #28 light at the end of the tunnel

Hello hello! As suggested, there wasn’t one of these last week, so lucky you, you now get two. Joking, of course! Got you though, didn’t I?! Shhh, leave me alone, it’s my blog and I can make as many silly jokes as I want!

Right, so what has been going on since last time?

No, I didn’t mean that, although that was how I spent the bank holiday weekend… Seven games across four days- not a bad way to celebrate the resurrection of christ and all that!

That’s more like it: the backgrounds are really, almost complete. And I couldn’t be happier! But I still have a few left to do and they aren’t the easy ones. But I’m kind of at the point now where I’m picking the lesser of two evils each time I work on a background (or any of the remaining tasks), because they’re all pretty difficult as yep, I already did the easy(er) ones. But I’m definitely in the swing of things now with them, so the harder ones aren’t feeling quite as daunting as they did a month or so ago.

As you can see from the screen grab above, I also figured out how I was to finish the background for the nightclub scene. I had decided on the use of 16mm film a while back, as it gives a strobe effect by its very nature, alongside some great patterns and colours- somewhat reminiscent of the type of lights you get in such establishments (in a very abstract/ impressionistic way, of course). But the ‘extras’ were still just a figment of my imagination, until the beginning of this week when I got a great idea of how to add those in. Again, I wanted them to be quite impressionistic as well, so the focus stays very much on the protagonist, but I didn’t want her dancing in an empty club either, as that just would have looked bad. Or at least not suitable for the type of atmosphere I wanted to convey in this sequence.

So I went on to the stock footage website Pexels like I have many a time for this project and downloaded a load of clips of people dancing. I then selected 12 of those and rotoscoped the silhouettes of the people, but I did this on every other frame, so it would feel more ‘club-like’. I then brought them into Premiere and changed the opacity and blend mode, so they merged with the background. When moving, it really does look like they’re under strobe lights, and it gives the type of feel to the background I was after.

The nightclub shot was definitely giving me a bit of stress, as I had no idea how I would be able to set about creating it, or if I’d be able to pull it off altogether. Yay, self doubt. It still needs a bit of tweaking, as I have’t quite established how I’m going to organise the background characters- it’s turning into a mini logistical nightmare (but that’s nothing new at this point)! But I can see that once I get that sorted, it’ll be a really impactful shot: I’ve done a few test exports of that section and I am pleased with how it’s looking, even if it’s not quite there yet.

Next week, I’m planning on working through the remaining backgrounds, though there are a few which require reference shots, but hopefully I can get those this weekend. I’ll admit that I’ve kind of taken my foot off the gas with the film at present in terms of pace/ output each day. This is likely because of the difficulty of it right now, so it feels like half a days work is plenty before my brain starts to get too frazzled! Most of the work on it right now is ‘thinking work’, rather than just rotoscoping/ colouring etc, where it was easy to complete 7-8 hours of work daily. But completing a section or two each day at the moment is a pace I’m happy with. As long as I get something done on it every day, then I’m fine with that.

In addition to the above, I’ve also relaxed any deadlines I had- or at least any for this years festival cycle. I now have the end of August/ beginning September as my completion date, which has definitely released any stress the deadline was giving me. And judging by the fact that my sleep has improved almost 100%, then that was probably a lot! See previous posts for context… There’s no way I’d be able to finish it by the end of May anyway without rushing it and likely ruining my mental health in the process! Disappointing it will take longer than I had imagined, but the film (and my wellbeing) will be all the better for it. So yeah, I just wanted to quickly update on that. And I feel this Autumn deadline is much more realistic too and hopefully won’t need to shift any further.

Ok, this has turned into a bit of an essay as usual(!), so I’ll leave it here and see you in the next one xo